Businesses recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, virtual machines, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth. Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, for example by migrating data to lower-cost storage over time, reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc. Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset and look for solutions that leverage their data. For instance, data analysis capabilities, information management, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
Use cases exist where business desire to have users operate applications in an isolated space, such as a sandbox, within a computer network. For example, a business may desire certain applications to be isolated to avoid malware infecting large portions of the computer network. In another example, a business may desire to isolate application instances to enable custom configurations of the application. As another example, a business may desire to run certain applications in a specialized environment to reduce costs. For instance, by running a particular application within a virtual machine, the costs associated with requisitioning computing resources to run the application can be reduced. However, supporting a large number or variety of virtual machines can include additional overhead relating to virtual machine management software or systems.